Ann Crittenden

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist, author, and lecturer. She was an economics and investigative reporter for The New York Times from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, winning numerous awards and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Prior to her work at the Times, she was a staff writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek and a reporter for Fortune magazine. She has been a visiting lecturer at MIT and Yale, an economics commentator for CBS News, and executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Since leaving the Times, Crittenden has written four books and a play, in addition to numerous magazine articles for publications as diverse as Barron’s, Foreign Affairs, and Glamour.

Recent Articles

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women By Elisabeth Badinter, Metropolitan Books, 224 pages, $25.00 Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting By Pamela Druckerman, Penguin Press, 304 pages, $25.95 Don’t smoke or drink while pregnant. Breast-feed for a year, if possible (it almost never is). Buy organic. Read to your little one every day. Don’t work full time unless you have to, line up the right schools, and if you can’t manage everything on this list, try not to wreck your kids’ fragile psyches with the guilt unleashed by your failure. The current advice to mothers makes child-rearing sound as fun as a sentence to Leavenworth. In the inevitable reaction, books attacking the escalating demands on mothers have become a cottage industry over the past ten years. Elisabeth Badinter, France’s preeminent woman intellectual, has responded to the rise of what she calls motherhood...

This is the second in a two-part series on Israel's policies toward its Palestinian minority . To read the first part, click here . A few weeks ago an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset was interrupted repeatedly by a female member of a far right party. He finally told her to “shut up,” whereupon she stood up and poured a cup of water over his head. The video went viral, and the joke was: “The only good Arab is a wet Arab.” Relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel are worsening. According to Shalom Dichter, executive director of Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, “a harsh stream of ugly racism seems to dominate public debate.” One phrase I heard over and over on a recent trip to Israel was, “It’s a tinderbox.” Under the current government—the most right-wing in Israel’s history—a flood of new legislation has targeted Palestinian citizens. The ban on family unification—...

This is the first in a two-part series on Israel's policies toward its Palestinian minority . It’s hard to fall in love and have a family in Israel if you're one of the country's 1.5 million Palestinians. Last month, the Israeli Supreme Count upheld the constitutionality of the 2003 Citizenship and Entry Law, which strips Israeli Arab citizens—one-fifth of the population—of citizenship rights if they move to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip to live with a spouse; Jewish settlers, on the other hand, retain their citizenship. It also prevents spouses from the Occupied Territories (or the “enemy states” of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran) from living in Israel without going through a Kafkesque process of applying and reapplying for temporary residency. From the beginning, the law has been challenged by human rights-groups on the grounds that it is discriminatory. By a narrow 6 to 5 majority, the Israeli Supreme Court waved that concern aside. “Human...

The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? , by Deborah Stone, Nation Books, 327 pages, $27.95 On a warm summer evening several years ago, I was strolling through Midtown Manhattan on my way to meet friends for a drink. I paused outside the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, and in that absentminded moment, someone grabbed my purse and took off. As I started after him, yelling, "Stop, thief!" a jogger suddenly raced passed me and rounded the next corner in hot pursuit. Within minutes the runner reappeared, my purse in hand. Dashing past me, he silently handed it off like a baton and kept going without ever breaking stride. Until I read Deborah Stone's The Samaritan's Dilemma , I had thought of this incident only as an amusing New York City story. Now I see it as an example of what Stone calls "everyday altruism." It's her premise that people do things to help other people all the time and that altruism is a powerful but invisible force in our lives. We have a deep need...

The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy by Norton Garfinkle (Yale University Press, 230 pages, $22.00) Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm (Yale University Press, 321 pages, $30.00) --- As the Bush administration implodes, the chances that a Democrat will be the next occupant of the White House are looking better every day. But what difference would that make to the economic well-being of most Americans? What economic policies would a new administration be likely to follow? More to the point, what are the chances that a change at the political helm would provide any new vision or coherent new direction for the economy? No one can honestly answer these questions yet, but two new books offer some thoughtful insights on what would enable the American economy to grow faster and fairer. Their authors are economists, open to evidence rather...